Edwin Carels

Spaces of Wonder: Animation and Museology

"Space is now not just where things happen; things make space happen."
Brian O'Doherty: Inside the White Cube – The Ideology of the Gallery Space, University of California Press, Berkeley,
i
1999, page 39

The days that animation was the guilty pleasure of a limited group of cinephiles and
discreet art devotees are over. Finally? What is at stake when animation leaves behind
the limited confines of the cinema screen to surface in the white cube or a museum
wing? Purists may consider the new, warm embrace by the art world as a suffocating
gesture. What is the compensation for – on average – a serious loss of projection
quality and an intense, collective experience? From a historical point of view
however, there are several good reasons to argue that animation does belong to the
exhibition space, and that the development of animation as an artistic practice actually
precedes the cinema with at least three centuries, starting already with the magic
lantern. From its origins, animation can be understood both as a method (a
technology) and as a metaphor (a strategy for provoking interpretation). From the
earliest days of museology, via the modernist white cube and the ubiquity of
electronic images in the digital era, there is the recurring ambition to turn the site of
an exhibition into a 'space of wonder,' an actualization of the historic Wunderkammer
(curiosity chamber), where the visitor is positioned in a dynamic constellation that
plays with the parameters of time and space. Yet the practical manifestations of
animation in the field of visual art often manifest a rather different, more derivative
character.

Introduction: Animating Art Spaces

Since a number of short films by William Kentridge were selected in documenta X in
1997, his career took a decisive turn and the doors of major galleries, musea, art
festivals and even operas opened. This example soon was followed by younger artists,
although with often less thematic richness or formal ingenuity. Since the turn of the

i Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube – The Ideology of the Gallery Space, University of California Press, Berkeley,
1999, page 39.

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century the gallery world is being besieged by a new generation of assertive
animation artists; and also big public institutions are opening themselves up to the
legacy of animation. From PS1's Animations (New York, 2001) to Drawing Room's
Shudder (London, 2010) and from Il était une fois Disney at the Grand Palais (Paris,
2006), to the prestigious world tour of Pixar, 20 Years of Animation starting from the
Australian Centre for the Moving Image (with a stop at the New York Museum of
Modern Art, 2006): this sudden upsurge of interest can hardly be coincidental.

From an art critical point of view, animation's popularity may be understood as an

extension of the art world's recent reappraisal of craftsmanship and inclination
towards design. To this, animation brings along its own set of questions about the
status of the artifact, the dynamics of drawing and the allure of materiality (plasticine,
inked cels etc.) In this era of ubiquitous digital reproduction technologies, the
question of hardware and physical manifestation obviously plays a role. As Lev
Manovich observes: "Today, while outside one finds LCD and PDA, data projectors
and DV cameras, inside a museum we may expect to find slide projectors, 16 mm
film equipment, 3/4-inch video decks."(2006, 14) Yet, it is unlikely that so many
musea would turn themselves into safety havens for obsolete media out of a strict
concern for technological conservation.

The intervention of different media technologies in the relationship between viewer

and screen(s) in the art space has become a common practice. Artists and musea no
longer simply offer the viewer something to look at, but place him or her inside a
space that incites exploration. The question now poses itself to what extent the
practice of animation brings in its own set of 'problems' or paradigms, and whether
these are really new, or rather practices rooted in the past. To determine the actual
relevance of animation (as confirmed by so many contemporary exhibitions), it is
important to retrace the evolution of museological display. The example of some
emblematic artists here under consideration brings to the surface a parallel history of
animation. Each of these artists has developed a distinct practice that can be called
animation beyond animation, a way of presenting images that ties in with the tradition
of animation before the history cinema even started. More than purely a filmic
practice, animation thus needs to be understood as the staging of an agency: the
manipulation and interpretation of intervals, not only between film frames, but also

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between images and objects in space. As with the earliest optical toys, the animated
image can only occur thanks to physical action and physiological response, always
mediated by the observer.

This concept of agency, combined with notions such as scripted spaces (Norman
Klein), devices of wonder (Barbara Maria Stafford) and the evolutive concept of the
white cube (Brian O'Doherty), is essential when trying to grasp different
manifestations of animation in the context of the Wunderkammer, the magic lantern
performance, early avant-garde animation, kinetic art, structuralist cinema and digital
animation. From a media-archaeological approach (re-interpreting the past in the light
of the present, with a healthy disregard of the notion of history as progress)ii the
topicality of animation appears symptomatic of an even larger development in visual
culture and what is now best described as data culture (comprising all sorts of text-,
sound and image based manipulations of electronic information). Animation is
currently no longer understood as a subset of film history, but rather the inverse: as
technically older as well as culturally more significant for our media-saturated
society.

Yet it is often anachronistic, handcrafted animation that is cultivated by artists for its
particular aura. While the range of electronic media is expanding at incredible speed,
a conversion to 'old fashioned' animation (or sometimes just an electronic emulation
of it) can thus be understood as the desire of young artists to tap into a tradition on
their own (technically often quite naive) terms. Crude Plasticine creatures,
rudimentary silhouettes, the soberness of a simple felt pen or some straightforward
graffiti marks: Nathalie Djurberg, Kara Walker, David Shrigley and Robin Rhode are
successful examples of artists who revive techniques and strategies that often go back
to the earliest days of animation film. Whatever their style, these artists all embed
their short film works in installations. The unavoidable curatorial question – whether
or how to present linear works as permanent loops – again ties in with the genealogy
of animation, before the advent of cinema. With on the one hand the magic lantern
and on the other the thaumatrope, a linear and a looped mode of display already was
in place long before the filmstrip occurred. Mary Ann Doane situates such a dialectic

For a general introduction in this field, see Media Archeology – Approaches, Applications and Implications, Erkki Huhtamo
ii

and Jussi Parikka (eds.), University of California Press, Berkeley, 2011, and Jussi Parikka: What is Media Archaeology?
Polity Press, Cambridge, 2012.

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in a variation on this opposition: "It could be said that the cinema, immaterial product
of a beam of light, is haunted by optical toys; by the miniature, touchable,
manipulable, opaque image."(Doane 2009, 152)

The most distinctive feature in comparison with live action cinema is that animation is
above all the art of producing, not re-producing time. But when discussing animation
within the domain of visual art, the main question to be addressed is how this
manifestation of an autonomous time-regime is stored and then released again in a
given space. What is animation, other than film? Time taking place? Where can
animation take place? Where does animation exist, if not on film? This inevitably
leads to questions about scenography. "Any narrative, object, relationship or action
has to be or take place somewhere," Suzanne Buchan writes in the catalog to her
Spacetricks exhibition, co-curated with Andres Janser for the Museum of Design
Zurich (2005, 6). Buchan underlines that animation film "has the unique quality to
create spaces that have little in common with our lived experience of the world: in
animation, there is a preference for presenting fantastic, invented and often impossible
places" (6). Yet how can this characteristic be retained in the realm of actual space?
How can an exhibition on animation signify more than a comment on the actual film,
like an extra on a DVD? It is not because Disney auctions their animation cels as
autonomous artworks, that this effectively implies an artistic relevance for the pro-
filmic material to exist next to a finished film. Obviously, art history offers legitimate
arguments to value a sketch as much as a finished piece, and to promote an artifact as
art 'after the fact.' But when dealing with spatial effects, then the agency of the
architecture of the exhibition room needs to be addressed as well, since exhibition
space always has been an important marker of meaning for modern art. How does the
artwork 'function' in the space, how does its manifestation make sense?

A good example of the challenge, intricate to this question of the spatialization of a

time-based medium, was the Watch Me Move: The Animation Show exhibition (The
Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2011). Clearly, the organizers wrestled with the
problem of how to equate artistic integrity with the integral viewing of so many
canonic titles. With its ambition to introduce a wide-ranging selection from the
history of animation to a broader audience, it allowed the audience to move freely
from one projection to another. Only one intermediary space showed objects rather

4
than moving images: a quite random mix of antique optical toys, vintage merchandise
and contemporary artworks. There was also a room where film-fragments and clips
from TV series were projected on two huge, opposing surfaces. Emphasis however
clearly lay on the narrative short film, presented either in modules for straightforward
viewing, or in stylized, designed spaces. The earliest historical examples in this film-
museological trajectory were to be found on screens floating freely in space,
surrounded by suggestive, semi-transparent curtains of loose black threads. The idea
was perhaps to return the visitor to a viewing situation before the nickelodeon, when
the cinema was just one among many attractions on a fairground. However, instead of
rivaling for attention with the live attractions in a historical amusement park, here the
screens seemed to be competing among each other. The cacophonous collage of so
many films led to some incongruous combinations, such as the Quay Brothers' In
Absentia (2000) sandwiched between a Jurassic Park clip (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
and William Kentridge's Shadow Procession (1999). Watch Me Move was an
exhibition with many key figures present, but the intervals between them did not
provoke an interesting dynamic. A fundamental concept in the technique of animation
is the 'key-frame,' a crucial position of a figure. The in-betweener is then the one who
fills in the necessary intermediary steps of that figure to complete its movements. In
the case of an exhibition, one could consider the artist or curator the one who
determines the key-frames, inviting the visitor to do the 'in-betweening.'

Traditionally, in the museum the visitor is free to move among images that are static;
in the movie theatre it is the opposite. And although the eyes are free to scan the
screen, there is no control over the order of the images and the duration of the
observation. This fundamental difference in freedom of movement of body and mind
is allowing the museum visitor to bridge the gaps between the works according to his
or her own tempo, in other words: to choose one's own key-frames, to animate en
passant the intervals and to determine the duration of the visual experience. To look
at art in a cinematographic way was the explicit premise of Philippe-Alain Michaud
with his 2006 Pompidou exhibition Le Mouvement des Images. In the catalogue, he
writes:

Nowadays, at the dawn of the 21st century, while we are witnessing a massive
migration of images in motion from screening rooms to exhibition spaces, a

5
 migration borne along by the digital revolution and prepared by a twofold
phenomenon of dematerialization of works plus a return to theatricality of the
art scene, it becomes possible, not to say necessary, to redefine the cinema
beyond the experimental conditions which governed it in the 20th-century-
that is to say, no longer from the limited viewpoint of film history, but, at the
crossroads of live spectacle and visual art, from a viewpoint expanded to
encompass a general history of representation. (2006:16)

Matching modern art to the model of cinema (instead of vice versa), and recognizing
a posteriori how a paradigm can already be operative long before it is recognized as
such: this is also applicable to the praxis of animation. Focusing on four sets of
artistic practices, the following text puts to the fore a range of curatorial approaches.
What these artists essentially have in common is that they all 'think out of the (black)
box', not only by demonstrating an expanded notion of animation and engaging in a
dialogue with their surrounding setting, but also through a resolute destabilization of
the space around their work, thereby according a central role to the viewer. Although
clearly distinct from each other, each case consciously engages in a museological
discourse, linking the notion of animation to either a historical, a modernist or a post-
modern notion of museum practice. From wandering around the installation work of
the Brothers Quay, grounded in the pre-modern history of museology (the peep box
and diorama), we shift to the white cube surroundings of Robert Breer's revolutionary
yet discrete kinetic sculptures, moving on to the disorienting, multi-disciplinary
manifestations of 'Annlee' (an avatar temporarily owned by Pierre Huyghe and
Philippe Parreno), to end up standing in middle of a Line Describing a Cone - the
famous expanded cinema piece by Anthony McCall. The way these artists have
conceptualized their work around the notion of animation as a method and/or a
metaphor, provides a useful context to develop some more general insights on the
potential of animation for the contemporary exhibition space.

Keyframe One: Animating History (the Brothers Quay)

The bristling curiosity cabinet is the spectacular embodiment of the ancient, force-
filled microcosm and the modern, 'chaotic' cosmos. (...) When opened, the geometry of
the chest's structure dissolves, its multimedia fragments spilling into adjacent spaces.
(Stafford 2001, 2-3)

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Since they combined their anamorphic fairy tale excursion of The Comb (- From the
Museums of Sleep), 1990) with a more explanatory, but no less suggestive
documentary on the same phenomenon of visual distortion (De Artificialia
Perspectiva – or Anamorphosis, 1991), the Brothers Quay have continued to warp the
distinction between filmic and museum spaces through a string of commissioned
films in which they explore particular collections, typically approaching these through
the eyes of a solitary, night-time visitor in a Wunderkammer.iii These recent
documentaries are no less anamorphic in the sense that each is made from a radically
singular viewpoint, and rather mystifies than elucidates. Like their painting
predecessors from the mannerist epoch, the Brothers Quay systematically build in
disorienting signals as ironic commentaries on the notion of 'true vision.' In 1997,
they started applying this approach to installation-work and objects for the museum
space, involving the visitor in a carefully choreographed interplay between objects
and sightlines.

Before musea became clearly defined spaces and canonized artworks were aligned to
become a frame of reference, the 17th century Wunderkammer was a demonstrative
place, where the heterogeneity of a collection was matched with the curiosity of the
privileged guest. The whole space functioned like the optical toys of the 19th century
(also called 'devices of wonder'): as a playground for experimentation. With the
gradual consolidation of the museum model, the proximity and active involvement of
the visitor within these semi-scientific spaces was traded against accessibility for
larger audiences. As a consequence (Therefore), the objects on display were no longer
kept within reach, but presented either framed or in vitrines. This led to the classic
paradigm of all musea: to conserve in order to display, aimed at a purely visual
decoding of artworks and artifacts.

By putting things in a room or in a box, musea became instruments to direct our gaze.
Confining the space around objects created a systematic focus, and the format of
presentation became increasingly systematized. In the course of the twentieth century,
the convention of the white cube became the guiding principle to exhibit

These commissioned museum-films comprise The Phantom Museum - Random Forays Into the Vaults of Sir Henry
iii

Wellcome's Medical Collection (2003) and more recently Inventorium of Traces (2009) on Jan Potocki's Castle at Lancut-
Poland, and Through the Weeping Glass – on the Consolations of Life Everlasting - Limbos and Afterbreezes in the Mütter
Museum (2011), shot at The College of Physicians, Philadelphia.

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contemporary art: "Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial, the space is devoted to the
technology of aesthetics." (O'Doherty 1999, 15) With his influential essay Inside the
White Cube Brian O'Doherty famously demonstrated how the history of modern art
correlates with changes in that space and the way we position ourselves within.
Already in 1976, he observed "We have now reached a point where we see not the art
but the space first". (O'Doherty, 14) Not only did the actual objects on display
become secondary to a narrative of spatial experience of the interior. Since the
Seventies, attention has also increasingly shifted towards the exterior of the building,
the experience of the space outside the museum, as epitomized by the so-called
Bilbao-effect: all over the world, the most reputed architects are solicited to turn
musea into optical boxes of a gigantic dimension.
Everything begins with mobilizing the individual viewer, a technique Norman Klein
calls "scripting space"(2004: 2). In his book The Vatican to Vegas: A History of
Special Effects Klein describes a variety of public spaces that are scripted such that
the spectator assumes the position of a central character in an imaginary story. The
script Klein alludes to is not a literal, but a visual one. He demonstrates how the
parameters of film production have their roots in Baroque culture:

By 1620, technology to support a kind of 'cinema' was in place: much finer

lenses, theatrical lighting, mirrored projectors to bounce an image from place to
place; manuals on geometric systems, from math to mapmaking, to building
"chariots" for actors to ascend or descend. "Camera" then amounted to a
"cinematic" room. The room ran movies of a kind. The movies relied on
convergence. Optical, sculptural, and theatrical illusion were squeezed inside
the same space. (61)

The contemporary dialectic between animation, cinema and the museum thus has its
roots in the mid 17th century, when the principle of the camera obscura was inverted
and the first magic lantern slides were projected.iv And as the evolution of the optical
toy in the early 19th century illustrates, the manifestation of animated images as an
autonomous art ran parallel with the elaboration of visual strategies within the newly
developing format of the autonomous exhibition space (as opposed to the private

ivThe French historian Laurent Manoni gave his 2009 catalogue exhibition and publication Lanterne Magique et Film Peint
the subtitle “400 ans de cinéma,” arguing that cinema started already in the 17th century.

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collection).v For Klein the prototypical notion of animation, as a manifestation of
spatialized special effects, is first and foremost an architectural phenomenon. Stafford
on the other hand, allows the viewer (or user) a much freer position. He or she is less
the object of immersion, and more an autonomous subject, investigating from the
outset a view of the outside world on a reduced scale. In her essay Revealing
Technologies / Magical Domains, she describes how, long before there was a museum
setting as such, the mutable Wunderschrank (curiosity cabinet) already invited a
"sensory structuring of common experience" (Stafford 2001, 11). For her exhibition
Devices of Wonder – From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (2001), she
significantly shifted the focus from the traditional museological marker of the
Kammer (chamber) to the Kabinet (cabinet), linking these 16th, 17th, and 18th century
contraptions even further back to the tradition of the memory theaters: "The
Wunderschrank belongs to a whole gamut of hollow furnishings awaiting the
incorporation of far-fetched contents that rely on the user for activation" (Stafford
2001, 7). As the discriminating choices between big projection and small monitors in
the Watch Me Move exhibition clearly demonstrated, this dynamic tension between
the space and its contents, and the experience of different scales (from looking up to
big rooms to looking down into small cases) is still a major concern in contemporary
exhibition design.

Loplop's Nest
This interplay between the agency of the visitor and the seductive coercion of an
exhibition space (the tension between freedom of movement and the fixed, unique
vantage point that allows to decode an anamorphic image) is precisely a central motif
in the work the Brothers Quay. Despite their fairytale-like figures and decors, they
intrinsically make experimental films, confusing the viewer with a disorienting frenzy
of audio-visual impulses. The problematization of a strictly visual translation of the
sensation of space and the tactile sense has been a crucial concern in all their work.
Their favorite lead character is a passive flâneur roaming Benjaminian passages, just
like the visitor of a historical panorama who is both free to move, yet unable to really
grasp the image. On some occasions: they conceive their 'dramatis personae' much

vFor an evolutionary of the museum interior, see Charlotte Klonk's Spaces of Experience – Art Gallery Interiors from 1800
to 2000, Yale University Press, 2009.

9
like a secret nighttime museum visitor, transgressing the rule not to touch.vi

Never 'just' filmmakers, the Brothers Quay always induce a sense of calligraphy in
their typographies, book covers, stage designs, exhibitions and theatrical mise-en-
scène, prolonging curvaceous traces in the sets and props through the choreographed
gestures and trajectories of their protagonists. vii In opposition to the standard visual
grammar of narrative film, their camera never transcends itself to place the viewer in
the position of an ideal and unseen witness. It rather operates as a participating
character on the set. Within an installation space however, this becomes a matter of
choreographing the gaze of the viewer rather than that of a camera.

One of the most widely seen projects by the Brothers Quay as installation has been
Dormitorium.viii In 2006, they began exhibiting the miniature sets of their films as a
configuration of two dozens small dioramas. The impact of this ensemble has
frequently been compared to a curiosity cabinet. In their non-linear configuration,
filling a whole exhibition space, the status of the ensemble of the 'sleeping'
Dormitorium sets transcends that of a presentation of original profilmic objects.
Behind glass, the collaged still lives lose their documentary character, and become
Joseph Cornell-like boxes.

Since the opening scène of Street of Crocodiles at least, the Brothers Quay have
cultivated a fascination for visual contraptions that require an active approach by the
viewer, in the lineage of peep shows and optical boxes. When the caretaker of a
dilapidated theatre triggers an automaton by spitting some saliva into a wooden
'oesophagus' – resembling a mutated version of an Edison mutoscope – the film
liberates its central character to follow his desire for sensory experiences.
Transposing the logic of their cinematographic universe into actual space, the
Brothers Quay lure their visitor into a similarly extrapolated optical device, where
movement is free and yet steered by spatial guidelines. In the first installments of
Dormitorium, filling a complete exhibition space, the visitor was already obliged to

vi For one museum film that never materialized the Brothers Quay took their cue from a Balthus painting: The Card
Players (collection museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam). The script of this film was published under the title
‘Nightwatch' in Conjunctions 46. Selected Subversions: Essays on the World at Large. New York: Bard College, 2006.
vii The first major retrospective of the Quay Brothers’ works, On Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-reading

Puppets, was held at MoMA, New York, August 12 2012 – January 2, 2013.
viii The Dormitorium project was originally produced in Amsterdam by the Holland Festival in 2006. It was co-produced by

and reprised during the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in 2007, before it started to travel, in varying
constellations.

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choose at the entrance between starting from the left or the right side. The trajectory
through the presentation was explicitly non-linear, thus immediately raising an
awareness of ambulation in space. In their installations, they inverse the restrained
frenzy of their animated films (rhythmic movements of the camera, elliptic editing,
and a hypnotizing flicker) into a threatening calm. Yet in both configurations, the
viewer becomes part of the optical mechanism and is instrumentalised to activate the
space, to become the animator of curved lines, dead objects or still frames.

This was already the case with their first autonomous museum project, the mysterious
optical box Loplop's Nest (1997). This anachronistic Wunderkabinet functioned as
both a deconstruction and a reconstruction of their short film Rehearsals for Extinct
Anatomies (1988), combining glimpses of visual motifs of their film with mystifying
text signs as surrealist intertitles.ix To grasp what was inside Loplop's Nest, one had to
bend one's knees, stand on one's toes, and walk around the box. Confronted with a
dozen lenses and viewfinders that abstract rather than actually reveal the inner
sanctum of this incongruous piece of furniture (a large scale wooden chest on a
pedestal), it was up to the viewer to imagine what was lurking inside, to move from
peephole to peephole and mentally animate the intervals between the glimpsed
insights. Or as Stafford describes the interaction with Loplop's historical predecessors:
"The cosmos as displayed in the Kunstkammer was not so much a static tableau to be
contemplated as it was a drama of possible relationships to be explored." (Stafford
2001, 6)

Whereas in the particular case of the Brothers Quay the interest in peepshows may be
linked to their fascination for miniature universes and puppet theatre, the
reconsideration of early formats of optical entertainment and visual display has
meanwhile become a wider phenomenon. Precisely around the time when digital
media and wearable gadgets like smartphones and global positioning systems started
to alter our perception of space and distance, musea showed a renewed interest in the
archeology of optical contraptions. In most of these exhibitions, the relationship with
contemporary art is made explicit or at least alluded to. They imply a continuity that

ixFor a well-illustrated documentation on this – now lost – object, see my essay ‘Crossing Parallels,' published in the
artist's magazine COIL 9/10 (Proboscis, London, 2000). The titles added to each peephole suggested an entirely different
kind of narrative, as for instance: Everyday Gardening; At the Edge of this Forest the Text is Waiting ; The Interior of Sight
; Loplop's Speech – in front of a Magnetized Epidermis ; The Pull of the North (formerly) Travelers’ into the Total ; Up
Yours – the Illustrious Forger of Dreams, etc.

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has run parallel with the development of the museum concept: from the magic lantern
to avant-garde cinema and from the peep box to contemporary mixed media art. But
rarely do these illustrations move from the comparative to the conceptual level, in a
way that Marcel Duchamp already demonstrated early on in the 20th century.x Wittier
than most of his successors in contemporary art, Duchamp understood why optical
toys historically had been considered at once as philosophical toys, and were applied
both as a method (for visual effects) and a metaphor (for the relativity of sight).xi
Indeed, when modernity first peaked in the Twenties, avant-garde artists were
anachronistically accentuating the legacy of popular contraptions that produce visual
stimuli, and post-war modern art would continue to do so in various guises and –isms.
This 'traditional' frame of reference persisted even within modernity's most prominent
innovation to our perception and understanding of modern art: the white cube.

Keyframe Two: Animating Modernity (Robert Breer)

"A small local feast, an object defined by its movement and which does not exist
except through it, a flower which fades the moment it stops, a pure play of movement
just as there are pure plays of light."xii
In the mid Fifties, a young American in Paris made the move from abstract painting to
producing animated films, flipbooks and mutoscopes. Robert Breer orbited around the
Galerie Denise René, and even had the opportunity to invite Marcel Duchamp for a
studio visit. "Very nice, but don't you think they're a bit too fast?" was his first
reaction when Breer showed him his early films.xiii The most explosive one of them
(Recreation, 1956) was aimed at the least possible feeling of continuity, presenting
with nearly each frame an entirely different image. Prior to this meeting, both artists
were included in Le Mouvement, the notorious show that in April 1955 claimed
kinetic art as a collective movement and launched the careers of Victor Vasarely,
Jesús Rafael Soto, Pol Bury and others. Alexander Calder and Duchamp were
included to ground the show in the historical avant-garde. In hindsight, the
importance of this configuration of artists proved to be a key moment for conceptually
expanding the presentation of the animated image and its expansion into the gallery

x Culminating with his La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The
Large Glass, 1915-1923), leading to his final revelation: the room-sized peep-box Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau, 2° le gaz
d'éclairage . . . (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas . . ., 1946-66)
xi Rodney Graham is a positive example of a contemporary artist who consistently refers to the simile prototypes of visual

contraptions in his work.

xii Sartre's definition of a mobile: in Jean-Paul Sartre: Situations III, Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1949. p. 37
xiii Cited in Robert Breer: Interview on the Occasion of the Exhibition ‘Le Mouvement' from Cinema to Kinetics, in the

catalogue Le Mouvement – vom Kino zur Kinetik, Museum Tinguely, Basel, 2010, p. 149.

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space. Breer was contributing rather discretely with 'just' a flipbook. Yet historically
this Image par Images is arguably the first folioscope to be commissioned by a
gallery as a valid medium for contemporary art, elevating a century old optical toy
into the realm of modernity. From then on Breer continued throughout his career to
alternate between filmmaking and constructing kinetic objects and sculptures, without
any hierarchical distinction.

The discussion on the definition of kinetic art (at the time still referred to as dynamism
by Denise Renéxiv) still resonates. How to deal with art that needs to be put in motion
by the visitor? Is the mobility of the visitor in the gallery also part of the kinetic
aesthetic? Do the mechanics of kinetic art also comprise cinema? Or vice versa: can
cinema, including animation, be considered as a substrand of motorized, kinetic art?
In 1955 a yellow handout was released at the occasion of Le Mouvement, but behind
this collective stance – positing that color, light, movement, and time would form the
foundation for the future development of kinetic art – there was a multitude of
rivaling notions, even among the main organizers of the show (Vasarely, Hultén,
René). Roger Bordier, the author of the so-called 'Yellow Manifesto' (Manifeste
Jaune 1955), even suggested to put theater, dance and Baroque light shows in the
category of kinetic art. (Bordier 2010, 9)

Motorized minimalism
After this first momentum of kinetic art, various other 'movements' followed, such as
Op Art and the widely publicized, touring exhibition The Responsive Eye (MoMA,
New York, 1965). In the mid-sixties, Robert Breer created several abstract geometric
sculptures that, when reproduced on photographs, are completely in tune with the
distilled, stripped down aesthetics of minimalism, then also dominating the art
discourse. As with a typical Carl Andre or Robert Morris sculpture, the visitor is free
to walk around or along Breer's sober, geometric constructions. However, their
essential characteristic is that they hide a motor inside, which allows the sculptures to
move extremely slowly across the floor, thus adding a particularly subtle coup de
théâtre once the visitor notices the changed positions of the works. Their motorized,
usually hardly perceptible displacement endows Breer's pieces with an extra sensation

xiv See Roland Wetzel: Einleitung, in the catalogue Le Mouvement – vom Kino zur Kinetik, Museum Tinguely, Basel, 2010, p.
7.

13
of the passage of time and destabilizes the white cube's apparent neutrality.xv His
modernist looking mono-volumes (Floats, or creepies, as he called them generically)
often carry titles that provoke ironic connotations. Discarding the pedestal to let the
sculptures explore the ground surface of the gallery meant opening up a democratic
dialogue between viewer and artwork: "This changes the role of the viewer
completely from the one assigned to him in front of an immovable statue or, in fact, in
front of a kinetic work. Not only do the viewers stand – because of the missing
pedestal – on the same level as the work, but the artwork also competes for their
(living-)space" (Holl 2011, 102). Breer's strategy has always been one of balancing
between complementary positions. Combining systemization with unpredictability, he
has produced all types of animated art, from hyperfast films to extremely slow
sculptures, challenging the viewer to use his or her feet to explore them in full detail,
thus allowing them a sense of agency.

Throughout a career spanning five decades, Breer has consistently adapted 'primitive'
animation formats such as the mutoscope, the folioscope, the stereoscope and the
diorama to his own absurdist logic. In the last period of his career, his subversion of
the space extended from objects in the room to motorized clouds on the ceiling, to the
experience of the wall itself. His Panoramas are wall-mounted objects made from
multi-layered cut-outs in wood, that incite the viewer to walk closely along a film-less
film in order to 'activate' it by mentally joining all the glimpses visible through holes
in his oblong construction. Breer also added a life-size section of a white cube to his
ensemble of Floats. Imperceptibly his Floating Wall (2009) lurks on the gallery
visitor, the mobile white wall continuously altering space and perspective, and adding
an sense of composition in time to the space. The effect is not merely visual but also
directly physical. The 'impurity' of Breer's approach is clearly intent on a physical, not
a purely optical experience. His kinetic works always addressed an embodied viewer.
Always focused on the experience of movement as an autonomous value, not limited
to a particular medium, Breer chose never to adhere to any particular art movement
but preferred, as already apparent in the group show of 1955, the position of an active
bystander.

xvO'Doherty's argument goes precisely against this apparent neutrality: "If the white wall cannot be summarily
dismissed, it can be understood. This knowledge changes the white wall, since its content is composed of mental
projections based on unexposed assumptions." Inside the White Cube 1999, op. cit. p. 80.

14
As the inclusion of Duchamp's motor-driven Rotary Demisphere (1925) in Le
Mouvement already made clear, the history of animation cannot be dissociated from
larger developments within twentieth century avant-garde art, just as the genealogy of
the museum, the parallel evolution of both architectural and technological strategies
of visualization and presentation is part of the history of animation. Prolonging the
legacy of optical toys to critically engage with what he dismissed as 'retinal art' was a
consistently recurring strategy in the oeuvre of Duchamp. In 1926, Duchamp
continued his exploration of impossible dimensions in animation with his film Anémic
Cinéma. When in the Twenties the feature film industry absorbed animation as a
subgenre within its serial production process, the intrinsic methodology behind
animation at the same time lay at the foundations of experimental cinema. It was
adapted on the one hand to provoke or even subvert the conventional art circuit; on
the other hand, it also allowed to expand on abstract painting. Through Surrealism,
but also Bauhaus, and Constructivism: animation was always part of the equation in
terms of avant-garde strategies. Robert Breer's work is to a large extent indebted to
the abstract and conceptual avant-gardes of the 1920s, that critically explored notions
of space and time, already taking into account the physiology of the viewer.

And yet, many art movements later, regardless profound technological developments,
the white cube remains the prevailing format to present contemporary art. In the era of
electronic spheres and virtual space, the empty environment of the white cube is still
offering opportunity to reflect upon (and commodify) artist's responses to culturally
important dynamics and processes. In parallel with the popularity of animation and
devices of wonder in the museum world, the historical examples of kinetic and optical
art are currently given prominence again, after many decades of gathering dust in the
darkness of storage spaces.xvi From programming the agency of a machine to
composing a space for the viewer to respond to, in our set of examples the focus thus
shifts from the object, to the space, to the interval or in-between, and finally to
explore the manifestation of agency as such.

One of the first symptoms of renewed interest was the exhibition Force Fields- Phases of the Kinetic (Hayward Gallery,
xvi

2000). Some examples of more recent exhibitions: Movement in a Square (The Square in Painting, Kinetic Art and
Animation, Stuttgart 2006); Op Art (Frankfurt, 2007); Sons et Lumière (Pompidou, Paris 2004); Lye exhibitions at the
Australian Centre of the Moving Image (Melbourne) and at the Ikon Gallery (Birmingham). Since 2006 Breer has had solo
shows in Annecy, Rotterdam, Bordeaux, Norwich, Basel and was prominently featured in Artforum in the November issue of
2010.

15
Keyframe Three: Animating Postmodernity (Parreno, Huyghe and 'Annlee')

"Installation art can be used as a barometer for the historical relationship between
avant-garde art and the museum."xvii

In the era of social media and non-stop upgrades of audiovisual applications, the art of
the moving image is understood in a much wider sense, and hence within a much
longer tradition. Film and media classes converge, history books are rewritten and in
the musea the oldest and newest technologies complement each other. William
Kentridge had already started expanding his vocabulary in 2004 with his own
interpretations of antiquated optical devices such as anamorphic mirrors,
phenakisticopes and stereographs, or even as early as 1999 if we consider his Shadow
Procession to be an automated form of ombres chinoises. Through exhibition titles
such as Seeing Double (2008) and What We See & What We Know (2010), it is
obvious that Kentridge intentionally problematizes the notion of perception. His main
theme however remains the evocation of lived memory, history and the inner life. In
combination with his style of graphics, the impact of referring to outdated technology
is often quite literally a trigger for nostalgic effect. Artists like The Brothers Quay,
Robert Breer or Philippe Parreno make use of optical contraptions, but, unlike
Kentridge, less to deal with history than with the experience of time in the actual
'now', the interpretation of the interval, the distance between the image and the eye,
the lived moment. Understanding animation as an aesthetic strategy to produce a
different and yet physiologically experienced time regime, the crux of the process lies
in the interplay between consecutive images or frames, bridging a difference at each
step. In animation jargon: it is a question of in-betweening, filling in the gaps between
two key frames.

Animating the museum

Philippe Parreno pushes this principle to the extreme, producing with each exhibition
a temporary autonomous zone that comes with its own parameters of time and space.
On a small scale for instance, he invites visitors to come back day after day to the
same gallery to be able to observe minute changes or variations of a large cell-
drawing on a light box (e.g. What Do You Believe, Your Eyes or My Words?

xvii Julie H. Reiss: From Margin to Center – the Spaces of Installation, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1999, p XV.

16
Speaking Drawing, 2007).xviii On a larger scale, as with his first retrospective Alien
Seasons (Musée de l'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2002) he scripts an entire
museum space to follow a temporal partition, linking all components of the exhibition
to each other, so the visitor appears to walk through a filmic montage. An even more
radical play with intervals was his recent retrospective 'suite,' that interrelated Zürich
(Kunsthalle, 2009), Paris (Centre Pompidou, 2009), Dublin (Irish Museum of Modern
Art, 2009–10) and New York (Bard College, 2009-10). Only those who could add up
all four locations (or key-frames) got the complete picture.

Treating the exhibition as a medium in its own right, Parreno systematically explores
and expands its possibilities as an integral 'object' rather than as a collection of
individual works. The in-between (2003) is also the title of a book on Anne Sanders
Films, the production company around Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster,
Charles de Meaux, and Pierre Huyghe. This is also the 'studio' that has facilitated the
collective film d'imaginaire project No Ghost Just a Shell (1999-2002) centered
around a fictive character 'Annlee'. Referencing the classic 1995 anime film Ghost in
the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1991), in 1999 Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe
acquired the copyright for a graphic figure called 'Annlee' and her original image
from the Japanese manga agency Kworks. 'Annlee' was not expensive, as she had no
particular qualities, and so she would have disappeared from the Anime scene very
quickly. The duo then offered 'Annlee' free of charge to a series of artists, to be used
for their own stories. Fifteen participants gave ‘Annlee’ two dozen different
emanations.xix Each artist shaped a new chapter in 'Annlee's' non-linear history,
complicating her existence as an empty sign, as well as complicating their own oeuvre
with only a small segment of a collective project. After three years, Huyghe and
Parreno formally (even legally) transferred the 'Annlee' copyright back to 'Annlee'
'herself'. To end the project the artists staged a disappearance in the sky through the
mise-en-scène of a firework (A Smile Without a Cat, Art Basel fair, Miami, 2002).
And still 'Annlee' is not fully allowed an afterlife of her own, as she was sold to the
Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), where the entire ensemble of No Ghost Just a Shell
found a permanent depository, allegedly the first group show to be bought in all its

xviiiFor an insightful comment on Speaking Drawing: . . . (2007) and other works by Parreno: see Verina Gfader's "
Nervous Light Planes" in animation: an interdisciplinary journal, July 2008, Vol. 3, n° 2, Sage Publications. pp. 147-16
xix Henri Barande, Francois Curlet, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Pierre Joseph with Mehdi

Belhaj-Kacem, M/M (Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag), Melik Ohanian, Philippe Parreno, Richard Phillips, Joe
Scanlan, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Anna-Léna Vaney all (re-)animated ‘Annlee'.

17
heterogeneous integrity by a museum. Comprising both a series of animated video
works, posters, a neon drawing, a wooden sculpture, a book and even a painting, this
constellation defies any simple categorization, posing again an avant-gardist
challenge to the museum, albeit it with playful acceptance. The artist duo even
conceived of a robot that follows a programmed pattern, moving about the wide white
space like a kinetic sculpture to project the films on varying segments of the walls.

Manifestly a multi-media artwork, No Ghost Just a Shell does make sense to

experience in small, individual portions, as long as conceptually the sense of an
ensemble is kept in mind. The ideal presentation, according to the artists, would have
been a simultaneous manifestation in as many different cities as there are pieces to
show, forcing the viewer to bridge serious distances in order to mentally complete a
picture. At once practicing and questioning ubiquity, network structures, globalization
and disintegration, the most flagrant paradox remains that the readymade commodity
'Annlee' was never exploited as merchandise (T-shirts, stickers etc.), as is normally
the case with Disney, Pixar or any similar enterprise. If anything, 'Annlee' was called
into animated existence to militate for the principle of multiplication of the same as a
form of difference.

Augmented animation
The rhetorical question remains why Parreno and Huyghe did not dismiss the tension
between the real and the art world altogether. They could have just as well conceived
their whole project for the context of the internet instead. Technically, they were too
early to come up with a solution like Chris Marker did for his online retrospective
Ouvroir (2008), virtually opening up to the world via the online MMORGPG Second
Life.xx And yet, already in 1999 both architecture and avatars were also being
constructed using the same keyboard and with similar algorithms. It was likely that
Parreno and Huyghe's motivation was that this would not raise the same level of
phenomenological doubt as when experiencing displacement in a physical 'space of
wonder,' where the viewer can actively partake in the animation of real intervals. As
Lev Manovich concludes when he describes the shift from virtual reality (without ties
to the physical world) towards the opposite, a hybrid, augmented experience within

xx Acronym for 'massively multiplayer online role-playing game'.

18
reality itself: "I suggest that the design of electronically augmented space can be
approached as an architectural problem. In other words, architects along with artists
can take the next logical step to consider the "invisible" space of electronic data flows
as substance rather than just a void – something that needs a structure, a politics, and
a poetics." (2006, 237)

From introducing their film language in a museum context (Brothers Quay) to

transcoding the museum as a filmic experience (Breer), to mediating reality by artistic
means (Parreno/Huyghe): the question always revolves around the configuration of
space, technology and the embodied gaze. Whereas animation can dispose of film as
well as the screen as mediators for its inventive language of artificial time, it cannot
do without any wider technological framework, a visual configuration, a viewing
device. From the earliest optical toys before the cinema, to the animated applications
of the multi-media era, a viewing experience always happens in a particular spatial
constellation and involves an interaction with technology. This staging of agency
implies a string of museological codes and conventions that are explicitly confronted
by the individual artists here under consideration, but that have also been critically
addressed in a more structural way, at the time when artists approached avant-garde
film, animation and installation art on a more explicitly analytical, even theoretical
level.

Keyframe Four: Animating Light in Space (Anthony McCall)

"A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends
geometrical space"xxi
Every artist craves for an accommodating context for his work, because only then can
it come into existence: in the eye of a public, an individual viewer first of all. More
than any other visual medium, animation always depends on this participation of the
observer to link the individual frames together. And this time-based experience needs
to be located. No matter how inventive a new generation of media artists' works is,
embracing both the language and legacy of animation as a natural part of their artistic
vocabulary, most still address their works with this other, architectural machine of

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Massachusetts, 1994, p 47. Originally published in 1958 as La
xxi

Poétique de l'Espace by Presses Universitaires de France.

19
vision in mind: the gallery or museum. It is this realm of authority, which turns their
creations into 'apparitions'. Jean-Louis Déotte suggests "The museum is the type of
institution that has the power to reveal a novel object; the work of art, a new subject:
the aesthetic subject, and a new relationship between the two: disinterested
contemplation."xxii (2011, 10) The basic script for a museum is to create space around
time; it is a time machine where different eras and centuries share the same spatial
coordinates, a place where things are put in a historical perspective, scripted by the
powers that be.

The emergence of the museum as a public spectacle at the end of the 18th century
coincided with the introduction of the first animated multi-media entertainment in the
audiovisual arts. In 1793, the Louvre opened its doors to the general public; in 1797,
Etienne-Gaspard Robertson started with his fantasmagories, which he advertised as
résurrections à la carte. In an abandoned Capucine convent near the Place Vendôme
in Paris, he scripted the space with an innovative audiovisual mix that is now
considered a form of expanded cinema avant la lettre, and thus laid the foundations of
our contemporary hybrid and highly immersive multimedia culture.xxiii With death –
and the guillotine – as his main source of inspiration (it was the aftermath of the
French Revolution), he offered the citizens an opportunity to bring back their beloved
lost ones by projecting familiar faces on a curtain of smoke during theatrical, heavily
ritualized performances. There was a strong sense of interaction and the experience of
the moving image surpassed the boundaries of the screen, as magic lanterns were
either hidden behind a translucent screen, or carried around the room to project from
unexpected angles. Laurent Manoni stresses the innovative use of a magic lantern on
wheels: "This invention transformed the frame, perspective and scenic space of the
projection. The traditional procession of images, used since Huygens' time, was
abandoned: now animated figures cross the screen in all directions, loomed up from
the base of the screen, came towards the viewer at an astonishing speed, and then
disappeared suddenly. The combination of the movable lantern and the moving slide
were an essential step forward in the history of 'moving' projection."(Manoni 2000,
141) Almost exactly one hundred years before the notorious Lumière film of an

xxii "Le musée est cette institution qui a la puissance de faire apparaître un nouvel objet; l'oeuvre d'art, un nouveau sujet:
le sujet esthétique, et une nouvelle relation entre les deux: la contemplation désintéressée." (my translation.) Déotte
argues that the museum is a site for free aesthetic experience, not ideological subjugation.
xxiii See for instance Oliver Grau: "Remember the Phantasmagoria! Illusion Politics of the Eighteenth Century and Its

Multimedial Afterlife", in MediaArtHistories, Oliver Grau (ed.), MIT Press, Cambridge, 2007, p 137- 161.

20
arrival of a train at the Ciotat station was presented to a panicking public, Robertson
already proved the impressive dynamic of a moving image, seemingly coming
straight towards the audience.

Para-cinema
Since the original fantasmagoria, animating images through projection on a dynamic,
ephemeral fog screen was not developed much further until in 1973, when Anthony
McCall wanted to show a white dot of projected light slowly growing into a (nearly)
complete circle on a black background. He used a rostrum cameraxxiv to make the
resolutely minimalist animation Line Describing a Cone, which he presented on a
freestanding 16mm-projector in the middle of a gallery space. Instead of using a
screen McCall filled the empty space with circulating smoke, originally coming from
tobacco or incense. Conceived as a solid light sculpture, the viewer gradually sees a
delineated cone of light, hanging in midair and modulating the space around it. As
Philippe Alain-Michaud summarizes:
The displacement of emphasis from the projected image toward the projection
phenomenon results in the following: the geometricalization of space: the
gallery's homogenous and omnidirectional space replaces the cinema's
heterogeneous space, formed as it is by different, qualitatively distinct place
(screen, theater, projection booth)." (2011, 13)
And as this animated 'sculpture' is transversing the whole space the viewer cannot but
interact. The cone of light provokes the agency of the viewer: to experience the cone,
one is even invited to walk through the projected light beam and stare into the
projector.

At the time, McCall (whose visual vocabulary also includes real flames, large pencil
drawings and time-based actions of 24 hours) was one of many artists who
represented the Structuralist film movement, deconstructing the medium into bare
essentials, such as movement, light, wavelengths, mechanics and optics. Individual
parameters of the cinema were isolated and thematized in what Ken Jacobs in 1969
coined as para-cinema. (Pierson 2011, 11) Jacobs himself revived the praxis of the
magic lantern performance, projecting or rather animating a film strip frame by frame,

xxiv Belonging to experimental animator George Griffin.

21
by manipulating the interaction between the filmstrip and the shutter. A host of
experimental filmmakers in the Sixties and Seventies started to analyze the dispositif
of cinema even before theorists focused on 'apparatus theory,' the same way and
around the same time as for instance the artist Marcel Broodthaers demonstrated his
institutional critique before it became an academic discipline.xxv "If the white wall
cannot be summarily dismissed, it can be understood. This knowledge changes the
white wall, since its content is composed of mental projections based on unexposed
assumptions." (O'Doherty, 1999, 80)

In the mid Seventies, around the time O'Doherty was formulating his critique on the
white cube, a different terminology was introduced by Jean-Louis Baudry to discuss
the technology and the operations necessary to produce the cinematic effect in the
viewer, and thus to induce subjectivity: the 'basic apparatus' and the 'dispositif.'xxvi
With the former, he indicated the technological constellation of the film stock, the
camera, the editing process and the screening conditions. He understood the
untranslatable term 'dispositif' as the immaterial effect of the work of the cinematic
apparatus, pointing at the 'agency' of both the machine and the ideologies that steer
them: the screening conditions that situate the subject. This critical approach of the
conditions of film viewing were developed further and varied upon by other post-
structuralist thinkers (notably Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard), and then
transposed to the electronic moving image (by for instance Raymond Bellour and
Serge Daney). But it was Michel Foucault who immediately demonstrated a much
wider potential for concept of the dispositif, to talk about subjectification in both
visual and architectural arrangements.xxvii Foucault also addressed the institutions of
cinema and the museum, among many other isolated, parallel places that he labeled
with the term 'heterotopias': non-hegemonic places were different timeframes are
juxtaposed and the experience of space is illusory. (Foucault 1984, 46-49) Neither
here nor there, they form a space of otherness.

xxv Broodthaers frequently addressed the dispositif of the cinema as well, and made at least one animated film: Une
seconde d'éternité - MB, La signature ou une seconde d'eternité d´après une idée de Charles Baudelaire, 1970. See Marcel
Broodthaers Cinéma, Fondacio Antoni Tapiès, Barcelona, 1997.
xxvi French philosopher Jean-Louis Baudry developed this concept in his two essays, "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic

Apparatus" (1970) and "The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema" (1975), which
became hallmarks of so-called "apparatus theory." First publications: Jean-Louis Baudry, "Effets idéologiques produits par
l'appareil de base," Cinéthique, no. 7-8, 1970, pp. 1-8. And Jean-Louis Baudry, "Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de
l'impression de réalité," Communications, no. 23, 1975, pp. 56-72.
xxvii Foucault first uses the term in Histoire de la sexualité. Vol I: La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) and explains it in

"The Confession of the Flesh" (1977) interview. In Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings (ed. Colin
Gordon), 1980: pp. 194-228.

22
Thirty years later, a multitude of new media is pervading our audiovisual culture and
thus making up new kinds of dispositifs and producing new subjectivities.
Meanwhile, a next generation is discovering anew Line Describing a Cone in
comprehensive thematic exhibitions on the legacy of the moving image, either in New
York, (Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, 2001) or
London (Eyes, Lies, Illusions, 2004) or Berlin (Beyond Cinema: the Art of Projection,
2006.) After the 90s wave of artists' cinema, a revival of the historical expanded
cinema followed, and McCall's animated circle became one of the most celebrated
pieces. However, the critical, ideological examination of dispositif and the historical
nature of aesthetic judgment is no longer the bias. The emphasis now lies on the
purely aesthetic exploration of the perceptual field of cinema, expanded to the gallery
space: the reversal of fixed positions, freedom of movement, the performative and
participatory aspects of the projection. As in the case of Breer's Floats and the peep
boxes of the Brothers Quay, the viewer’s participation consists primarily of freely
moving about to explore the animation from different angles and distances. McCall
multiplied Line Describing a Cone into a whole series of 'solid light films', and
meanwhile also adapted his approach to newer technologies (comprising video and
fog machines). From the perspectival geometry of conventional cinema, to the
ambient projection within a gallery environment, McCall has moved on to transform
projection from a performance into a permanent installation. This shifts the
experience from a minimalist sense of narrative suspense (watching the circle draw to
a close) towards a more ambient immersion into a visual, intangible dimension of
looped duration. The film has been transformed back into the logic of an optical toy.

Since the 70s, the critical bias of Foucault's use of the terms dispositif and heterotopia
has also evolved and now meets with a more constructive understanding. The crucial
question remains whether the museum can function as a critical engine in a positive
sense. As Beth Lord argues: "Museums today for the most part no longer aim to
'accumulate everything' or to 'constitute a place of all times that is itself outside
time."(2006, 4) To her understanding, the real content of the museum is not objects,
but interpretation:
As a space of representation, the museum is a space of difference. Foucault's
museum is not a funeral storehouse of objects from different times, but an

23
 experience of the gap between things and the conceptual and cultural orders in
which they are interpreted. (7)
Following Lord's notion of interpretation as the relation between things and the
words used to describe them, one can indeed interpret Foucault's dispositif as a
concept of 'in-between', or in his own terms, the connection that exists between
heterogeneous elements. In other words: animation as a metaphor. Instead of
imposing an importance, a value, a judgment, Lord observes how contemporary
musea invite people to fill in the gaps, allowing varying interpretations and
appreciations. Conceiving the museum as a dispositif for activation rather than
consolidation, is bringing it back to its origins, to the Wunderkammer and –cabinets,
where the visitor was assumed to play an investigating part, instead of being passively
subjectivified. More than cinema, animation always implied this constructive way of
looking and decoding, as there is no reality effect (as in live action film) to be
reconstructed.

Activating space
The impact of animation on the gallery or museum space can be thus a lot more
meaningful than the dislocation of a screening from the darkened theater to a black
box or to monitors inside a white cube. And it definitely has more potential than
simply displaying profilmic artifacts (cels, sketches, objects) as autonomous art.
Confronted with an aesthetic of the interval, between individual frames, peepholes
and objects, between the objects and the surrounding space, between human and
technological movement, between the gallery space and the 'real' world, each visitor
enters an exhibition as a space of wonder, where the integral mise-en-scène is part of
the experience, not 'just' the artworks, but also the space in between and around them.
He or she goes there to animate and to be animated, to interpret and to be guided, to
see and to complete one's perception, to actively engage with the dispositif. Without a
motivated 'reader,' any scripted space remains a dead zone. Without an inhabitant, any
constructed space remains a purely geometric artifice.

With her media-archaeological exhibition project Devices of Wonder, Barbara Maria

Stafford equally insists on the importance of the space in between, the gap, the
interval, and the critical potential of reflecting on older media within a contemporary
context:

24
 We need an analogical concept of technology, one that restores awareness of the
long and tangled lineage of apparatuses. As tools for transformation and
revelation, visual technologies expand human consciousness, allowing people to
see their material connections to larger ideas, forces, and movements. Instead of
an apotheosis paradigm – in which the disembodied user is abruptly joined to
the superior intelligence of a machine – the substance-filled gap implicit in the
word media (from medius, 'middle') has to be recaptured. This is the lesson of
legacy instruments for futuristic devices. (2001, 112)
Animation was never solely the domain of filmmakers. The Brothers Quay give
prominence to the viewer through a mise-en-abyme of the Wunderkammer. Robert
Breer's work activates the viewer by dynamizing both the floor, walls and ceiling of
the white cube around him. Philippe Parreno's invites the viewer to edit a group show
or artworks interspersed at great distances in time and place into a single story.
Anthony McCall requires the viewer to interact and even interrupt his animated beam
of light. Now animation is leaving behind the confines of the cinema to surface in
exhibition spaces, their practices (no matter how divergent) systematically point out
the legacy of earlier forms of visual animation and demonstrate its relevance for the
present. Animation beyond the animated film implies a return to animation before the
movie theatre.

Works cited

Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Massachusetts: Beacon Press.

Originally published in 1958 as La Poétique de l’Espace by Presses Universitaires de
France.

Bordier, Roger. 2010. In Roger Bordier, Robert Breer, Roland Wetzel and Thomas
Tode. 2010. Le Mouvement – vom Kino zur Kinetik. Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag.

Breer, Robert. 2010. "Interview on the Occasion of the Exhibition ‘Le Mouvement’
from Cinema to Kinetics." In Le Mouvement – vom Kino zur Kinetik. Heidelberg:
Kehrer Verlag: p. 147 – 150.

Buchan, Suzanne and Andres Janser, eds. 2005. Trickraum : Spacetricks.

German/English. Zurich/Basel: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich and Christoph Merian
Verlag.

Déotte, Jean-Louis. 2011. “Le Musée n’est pas un dispositif.” Cahiers

Philosophiques, n° 214: 9 – 22.

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Doane, Mary Ann. 2009. “The location of the image: cinematic projection and scale
in modernity.” In Art of Projection, eds.Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon
Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag: 151-66.

Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Dits et écrits, Des espaces autres.” (conférence for Cercle
d'études architecturales, March 14 1967). Published in Architecture, Mouvement,
Continuité, n°5: 46-49.

Holl, Ute, Andres Pardey, Laurence Sillars, Roland Wetzel. 2011. Robert Breer.
Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition Robert Breer at BALTIC, Gateshead
and Museum Tinguely, Basel. Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag.
Klein, Norman M. 2004. The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects. New
York and London: The New Press.
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